The Jew Car: Fourteen Days from Two Decades

by Franz Fühmann, Isabel Fargo Cole (Translator)

Originally published in 1962, Franz Fühmann’s autobiographical story cycle The Jew Car is a classic of German short fiction and an unparalleled examination of the psychology of National Socialism. Each story presents a snapshot of a personal and historical turning point in the life of the narrator, beginning with childhood anti-Semitism and moving to a youthful embrace—and then an ultimate rejection—of Nazi ideology. With scathing irony and hallucinatory intensity, reflections on the nature of memory, and the individual experience of history, the cycle acquires the weight of a novel. "Fühmann’s work, beginning with The Jew Car , can be read as a great literary self-analysis in the spirit of Freud. Through his work, he not only became conscious of his own thinking as it was seduced by totalitarianism, he also became capable of describing the mechanisms of a fascist upbringing with striking poetic power, transcending all theory." — Die Welt , on the German edition

Genres: Short Stories, Literature

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Franz Fühmann (15 January 1922 – 8 July 1984) was a German writer who lived and worked in East Germany. He wrote in a variety of formats, including short stories, essays, screenplays and children's books.
Notable awards
Heinrich Mann Prize 1956
National Prize of East Germany 1957 and 1974
Deutscher Kritikerpreis 1977
Geschwister-Scholl-Preis 1982

Reviews

[Joseph Schreiber]

I have had this book for a while and for some reason I did not know if I would like it. However, being very keen to read the recently released At the Burning Abyss, Fühmann's last major work, I took the advice of translator Isabel Cole and read this first. Fühmann is a wonderful storyteller, and his account of his youthful identification with fascism, his involvement during WWII, and time as a Soviet POW which would lead to his conversion to Socialist ideals (which would be later rejected) is a vital, important, and remarkably engaging story. He conveys both the naivety and the mental gymnastics required to reconcile the Nazi vision with the realities he encountered, and the stubbornness with which he tried to cling to those ideals even in the face of defeat.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2017/12/05/th...

[J.M. Hushour]

"Germany's fucked, you can write it off for the next thousand years."

It's unusual to be able to so clearly demarcate the evolutionary turning points in one's life, especially as an ethnic German in the first half of the 20th century. It's quite another thing to have the gumption and courage to put it all down in writing and be both funny and heartwarming about the fact that when you were a kid you were a Nazi.
Fühmann was not shy, unlike some other famous German authors (I'm looking at you Gunter Grass!), about addressing his impressionable Nazi youth. Fühmann was a Nazi, then a socialist supporter of East Germany and finally an irrepressible critic of the GDR, so he kind of got more awesome as he went along. The Jew Car is a stark, lightly fictional confessional of a naive Sudeten German whose trajectory takes him from being a youthful Hitler admirer, to being a Russian POW in the Caucasus, to coming to admire socialism, and then returning to East Germany (voluntarily!) where the story ends. The chapters are short and tight and often very funny. In the title story, schoolkids spread rumors about the yellow "Jew Car" full of blood-sucking Semites. When the narrator encounters the atrocious automobile and barely escapes with his life, a classmate reveals that the "Jew Car" was in fact her uncle's car and they were trying to ask for directions. Expeditions to buy beer and sausages by the narrator's gymnastics brigade get turned into Czech anti-German atrocities, and so on. By all turns baffling and amusing, it's nice for someone to turn themselves inside out and allow the reader to introspect for them: why would some idiot kid become a Nazi? And at what point do you realize it's all fucking insanity? Fühmann bares himself unabashedly and you can't help but be drawn into it.

[Aaron (Typographical Era)]

Born the son of pharmacist in Czechoslovakia, Franz Fühmann (1922-1984) would grow to become a prolific German writer of children’s stories, essays, poems, and film scripts. Autobiographical in nature, The Jew Car represents his attempt to compile, chronicle, and present readers with an insightful exploration of his radically shifting world views, particularly those that were formed in his earliest days of existence as a highly impressionable youth at the time of the Nazi party’s rise to power.

The collection opens with the title piece, in which Fühmann is introduced as an ardent young Catholic schoolboy. He’s never met a Jew, but he’s heard plenty of rumors about them.

READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/jew-c...

[lärm]

Interesting read. Fühmann recounts two decades of his life in short chapters which, although put in chronological order, can be read randomly as stories on their own, with the main protagonist being the only binding factor throughout the book. It's not action packed but is captivating nevertheless.

(Fühmann is one of those wehrmacht-turned-communist kind of writers which shows in the last chapters. Anyone who claims he saw the light from reading Lenin's ramblings should be treated with the highest caution.)

[Anoeska Nossol]

4.5 sterren van de 5 sterren

Wat een prachtig en aangrijpend boek. Ik heb in het verleden al meerdere boeken gelezen over de Holocaust en over de Tweede Wereldoorlog. Deze waren steeds uit het perspectief van Joden. Begrijpelijk ook, want zij konden na de oorlog het verhaal vertellen dat de doorsnee burger (nog) niet kende.
Toch, elk verhaal heeft twee kanten en ik vond het jammer dat er zo weinig verhalen in de schijnwerpers stonden die gingen over Duitsers. Toen ik 'De Jodenauto' ontdekte, was ik aangenaam verrast. Een boek dat vertelde over een kind dat opgroeide in dat grote Rijk en zelfs als jongvolwassenen steeds meer zichzelf leerde kennen. Het is aangrijpend omdat we vaak vergeten dat het voor vele Duitsers ook niet zo eenvoudig moet zijn geweest. Voor hen was die periode ook geen rozengeur en mannenschijn, en vele van hen waren in de val gelopen van propaganda.
Het is dan ook mooi om te zien hoe de hoofdpersoon steeds meer vragen begint te stellen. Je merkt sterk hoe het ook in die tijd ging. Hoe het enthousiasme steeds vaker in vraag werd gesteld en de personen in kwestie zich er niet meer zo prettig bij voelde.

Toch geen vijf sterren. Omdat ik het jammer vond dat er half weg een soort breuk ontstond. Als kind leek hij na een nare gebeurtenis verzeild te zijn geraakt in antisemitisme. Naarmate het boek vorderde, leek dat zo weer over te zijn. Ik vond het jammer dat enkel de strijd voor het Rijk en de voorliefde voor hun leider benadrukt werd, en niet wat hij nu werkelijk dacht van de Holocaust.
Als lezer kom je ook aan het einde niet te weten of zijn mening over Joden nu veranderd was. Dat vond ik heel jammer, omdat je hem op elk ander gebied toch van gedachten ziet veranderen.
De schrijfstijl vond ik ook niet altijd toegankelijk. Hier en daar waren de zinnen ijlen lang en stonden er ook veel nutteloze details in verwerkt zoals 'De lucht is blauw' wanneer dat niets toevoegde aan het verhaal of de plot.

[Marc Masurovsky]

Franz Fühmann's "The Car with the Yellow Star" is a curious exercise in self-reflection as a former Sudeten Nazi and antisemite who embraced the Third Reich unquestioningly, vowing to follow Hitler wherever and whenever.
He ended up doing hard labor in a Soviet POW camp and, when released, lived the rest of his life in the German Democratic Republic where he became a successful writer and poet.
Regardless of whether we believe him to be sincere or not (he does sound so), it's worth the read in order to understand how the indoctrination process works and what it takes to shed such a poisonous ideology.

[Philip Koehler]

If you are interested in understanding how young Germans became to fight for Hitler - this book provides interesting snippets of one soldier’s life. It is almost as if you were to read parts of a themed and long diary.